Amaeth Cymru the future of agriculture in Wales: the way forward, has been authored by Amaeth Cymru, a group whose membership covers a spectrum of interests, including farming unions, levy bodies, government, academics and industry experts.

Over two million people in the UK are living with sight loss. This will double to nearly four million people by 2050 as the population ages and underlying causes like obesity and diabetes increase. This places huge pressure on NHS eye care services.

The 2016 Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) report highlighted that sight loss is estimated to cost over £28 billion to the UK economy.

Research into new sight-saving technology could improve the lives of people at risk of sight loss and provide saving to the NHS and wider economy.

Two researchers from Centre for Health Economics and Medicines Evaluation CHEME, are co-investigators on the optical coherence tomography (OCT) study, which has been awarded £1.3 million of funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Invention for Innovation (i4i) Programme.

The first nuclear research institute in Wales has opened at Bangor University. The Nuclear Futures Institute has been established with funding from the Welsh Government’s Sêr Cymru programme, which is helping to attract world leading researchers to Wales, with funding also coming from the European Regional Development Fund and from the University.

The third episode of the BBC’s Blue Planet II spectacularly described a series of fascinating interactions between species on some of the most pristine reefs in the world. These reefs, analogous to bustling cities, are powered by sunlight, and provide space and services for a wealth of marine life.

The Heritage Lottery Fund has announced a grant of £409,700 for the Royal Commission’s partnership project: Commemorating the Forgotten U-boat War around the Welsh Coast, 1914-18. Thanks to money raised by National Lottery players, over the next two years the project will use the latest imaging techniques to reveal underwater wrecks from the Great War, and will support coastal communities around Wales to tell their previously untold stories about the Great War at Sea.

Creative Writer and Lecturer Alys Conran is the stand- out winner at this year’s Wales Book of the Year/ Llyfr y Flwyddyn, winning a hat-trick of Awards, scooping not only the one of the main prizes, the English Book of the year Award, a specially commissioned trophy designed and created by the artist Angharad Pearce Jones, and a £4000 prize, but also winning the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award English fiction Award and the People’s Choice Award, all for her debut novel Pigeon.

David has joked about the Holocaust before. In the comedy show he co-created, Seinfeld, an entire episode is devoted to Schindler’s List. In his own show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, he plays Wagner (a favourite composer of Adolf Hitler) to a co-religionist who accuses him of being a self-hater. He invites a cast member of the reality show Survivor to meet a Holocaust survivor and they proceed to argue over who had it worse off. Many suggested David’s jokes weren’t in good taste, that he had crossed a line this time. But had he?

Whilst it is widely accepted that sea level is rising because of the melting of the massive sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JC013109/abstract), by scientists at Bangor University in collaboration with Harvard and Oregon State Universities in the US, and McGill University in Canada, shows that the impact of the melting of these ice sheets will go far beyond just changing water levels. It could have further reaching impacts on global climate.

The new results show that sea level does not increase uniformly across the globe in response to melting of the polar ice sheets. In fact, sea level changes in response to ice loss are highly spatially variable, especially close to the retreating ice sheets. The new results, which are obtained with a numerical model of the global tides, show that the tidal changes due to ice sheet collapse and associated sea level changes will be highly variable and affect a number of different important processes.

Unsurprisingly, running a marathon is tough. It takes months of training before runners even make it to the starting line and this preparation can, at times, feel like punishment. The marathon runner in training can often be found limping around with blisters, sore muscles and blackened or lost toenails. Not, perhaps, an image we might naturally associate with the idea of “self-compassion”.